I came across the following press release (a bit old) and liked what I read. Specifically, that Couchbase was working on UnQL support with MS:

“Couchbase unveiled and released to the public domain the UnQL query language, (UNstructured Query Language). Jointly developed with Microsoft and SQLite, UnQL is designed to provide a common query language for NoSQL developers and help drive widespread adoption of NoSQL technology. Each company has committed to delivering product support for UnQL in 2012.”

By going to UnQL and partnering with MS, this puts Couchbase in an awesome position to develop a Linq (IQueryable) implementation of UnQL. If this happens, then querying a NOSQL or a RDBMS (or anything else) will be unified from the CLR perspective.

Could emit UnQL if Context is NOSQL or SQL if RDBMS…genius. If only Java had something like IQueryable <sigh>.

It also looks like Couchbase is dumping the CouchDb HTTP REST API for the binary Memcached protocol, which should be a big win from a performance perspective (sorry CouchDb users). Membase already uses the protocol, so it’s just matter of switching the HTTP REST API for UnQL.

Another develpoment in Couchbase is that CouchDb has been forked. The good news it’s still going to be open-source:

“As J. Chris Anderson notes in the comments, Couchbase is completely open source and Apache licensed: Everything Couchbase does is open source, we have 2 github pages that are very active:

Probably the most fun place to jump into development is the code review: http://review.couchbase.org/Let me clarify, if you like Apache CouchDB, stick with it. I'm working on something I think you'll like a lot better. If not, well, there's still Apache CouchDB.”

While possibly a bit traumatic for CouchDb afficiandos, this should be a huge win for Couchbase fans and for companies investing in Couch as stable, NOSQL solution.